


If The Stars Regret Me

by commoncomitatus



Series: Hold Me Till Winter [3]
Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Background Polyamory, Belonging, Character Study, F/F, First Time, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:21:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27995178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: The intersection of being lonely and being loved.
Relationships: Sandy/Tripitaka (The New Legends of Monkey)
Series: Hold Me Till Winter [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2050350
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	If The Stars Regret Me

**Author's Note:**

> Set in my future four-way polyverse... which apparently now has its own series.

**

There is silence all around her, and there is sound, and there is song.

Behind her: revelry. Another village saved, pried out from under the boot of demon rule. Another victory for the Monkey King and his merry band of misfits, another cause for celebration and cheer, for raised cups and raised voices, for the air to ring out with merriment and joy and defiance against a world that gives them too few moments like this.

By all accounts, the noise shouldn’t reach her here. She is far enough from the village, from its thankful, exuberant people, and from her friends. She is far enough from revelry, from celebration, from all those things that they love and she hates. The joy, the cheer, the raised voices: these things skitter under her skin, set her teeth on edge, made her wild.

Behind her: revelry, its roots burrowing so deep she thinks she’ll never dig it out.

Beneath her, shifting under the wet sand that shares her name: secrets and fear.

The crunch of broken shells, the frightened vulnerability of the creatures that once lived inside them. Hiding underneath the sand, hiding from the noise just like she is. She can taste the acid of their fear, these poor creatures, can feel in her own chest their struggles to breathe. They should be out there on the sea, drifting and rolling under the black waves, but they’re not; beached, dredged, washed up and laid helpless on the shore, they can do nothing but hide and wait.

Just like her, she thinks again, and shivers.

The sea will return to the shore soon enough. The tide will turn, bringing its black waves, and with any luck they will be powerful enough to dig up those little beached creatures and drag them back to the depths where they belong.

She hopes they will. She thinks—

She thinks she’ll help, if she can.

If she’s still here by then.

Her time here is precious. She knows that. Her time alone is always precious, and not so much truly alone as she would like. Her friends will come for her soon enough, wondering why she’s out here on her own instead of back there celebrating with them.

All this time, the four of them together, and they still don’t understand why their raised voices cause her pain.

Even in celebration.

Sometimes, she thinks, especially in celebration.

Their songs—

She speaks their language, but sometimes she thinks they don’t speak hers. Their songs, discordant and sometimes drunk, sound nothing like the ones she knows. They laugh, and their voices — she loves their voices, she loves their joy, she really does, but _oh_ — they cut through her and pull her insides apart.

She thinks maybe she doesn’t know how to sing for joy.

She thinks, sometimes, she doesn’t even really know how to feel it.

The word tangles on her tongue, knots inside her head.

She thinks she has more in common with the creatures under the sand, trembling and naked, their homes shattered by the boots of humans, than she has with her friends.

They are lonely, those creatures: thrown from the sea, swallowed by the earth and held down. They don’t belong here, in this world that sings in a language not their own.

Like them, she doesn’t belong here. But she doesn’t really belong out there either.

Before her: the sea, black and rolling and beautiful, swirling and saturated with salt and filled with swimming, singing things.

They speak her language, those singing things, but she does not speak theirs.

Sometimes, in moments like this, with voices singing at her from every direction, she thinks there isn’t a language in the world — the one made of earth or the one made of water — that she truly understands.

Her friends sing for joy, for celebration, for the thrill of being alive. And they are, and it is beautiful, but she doesn’t understand how to reconcile _alive_ with _joy_.

Even now. Even after all this time. The world is large, their voices are loud, and joy is such a strange thing to someone who still doesn’t know what it means to feel anything at all.

They taste it in each other. She knows this; she watches them sometimes. Two of them or all three together, and sometimes they look at her, bright-eyed and brazen and smiling, inviting and offering and giving, loving, wanting. 

_“There’s room for you too,”_ they tell her, and she knows that, she does, but what she doesn’t know is how a body like hers could fit into a space as sacred as theirs.

They are life and joy and celebration. She is water and sand and empty space, silent but so full of sound.

Her friends sing the songs of the earth, red-tinted and filled with breath and light, fire and hearth and home.

She still doesn’t understand any of those things.

She has them, all of them. But she still doesn’t—

She speaks, and they smile and they laugh and they look at her like they know her better than she knows herself. And then they speak, smiling and laughing and looking at her with warmth and love in their eyes, and she doesn’t understand any part of them at all.

And these creatures, swimming and singing in the depths, swallowed up by the salt of the sea: these, she knows, these she hears, these she understands. She hears their songs and she feels them inside of her and she understands their nuance and their meaning.

Loneliness and longing and a world that is dark and cold but theirs, theirs, theirs: these songs are her songs too.

She hears them and she knows them, and their songs are hers and their world is hers too, but her clumsy tongue can’t shape their words in any language but her own.

She sings to them sometimes, when their fear and pain cuts so deep she can’t bear it. When they are trapped under the waves, water-creatures snagged in earth-made nets, speared by earth-forged weapons, slain and slaughtered, the black sea turned blacker with their blood. Their wounds are her wounds, just as they have always been, and their songs have thrummed in her blood for as long as she can remember; she feels what they feel, understands their hurts and their hearts in a way she has never understood the coarse, dry feelings that come on dry land, and she sings to them because she yearns for them to understand her too.

But they don’t, and the silence that answers her songs is the loudest sound in both of her worlds.

*

She swims.

Underneath the stars, underneath the moon, underneath the soundless sky, she strips off her clothes, leaps from one world into the other, and swims.

Eyes open, relishing the saltwater sting: the water is hers, the salt is not. She can see, but not without discomfort, not without pain; it is not really so different from being on dry land, blinking against the blinding sun, the dazzling moon, the light of the world above reflected in pools of water, in polished glass, in the warmth glittering in her friends’ eyes.

She belongs here, but she doesn’t.

Out there, too, even among her friends. Their warmth and their light are beautiful things, but she is a creature of the dark and the cold, and she is so easily burned.

Here, at least, the salt only grits her body.

It gets in her eyes, fills her mouth, lashes her skin, but the place that holds her spirit, where the sound and the songs make their home, remain still and safe.

Their voices are much clearer down here. No warmth, no light, no humans or demons or gods, only the creatures who swim and sing their slow, sad songs.

She listens.

She listens and she hears and she understands: a thousand different voices all calling in a thousand different directions, each one singing and seeking and searching for a song that sounds like theirs. A thousand different creatures, each with its own voice, its own song, its own heart and spirit and soul, reaching and reaching through the depths and the dark, the salt and the water, the black waves and the blacker blood, reaching out for a mirror of itself.

She knows this feeling as well. It is hers, it is her, it is—

It is being surrounded by life, and still so much alone.

She calls to them, adding her voice and her song to theirs. She calls and she calls, mouth and eyes open until both are flooded with salt, until her lungs and belly are heavy with it.

They make no response.

Her language is not theirs. She hears the voices of the sea, its countless creatures, their sound and their song and sometimes their silences too, but she is not one of them and so they don’t hear her.

She is as much alone here — suspended between the water she loves and the salt that transforms it — as she is on dry land, flowing and fluid in a place where water was never meant to run so free.

Here she hears, here she knows, here she sees. But she is not seen, not known, not heard, and she knows that she will never be understood. Out there she doesn’t hear or see and she certainly doesn’t understand, but still somehow she is seen and heard and known, still somehow she is understood.

Her friends know her. The see her, they understand her, and they know her.

She tries so hard to know them too.

She tries so hard to understand them, to see herself in their eyes, to know—

She tries so, so hard.

But they are out there, on dry land, singing their songs of revelry and celebration, and she is here, salt-stung and swimming, singing songs of loneliness that no-one will hear.

She seeks out other ways to communicate, no less unheard.

It’s not really a fishing town, the place they set free, but where there is water there are fish, and where there are fish there is always fishing. Humans are predictable, in their hunger and their habits; she’s lived among them, learning their songs — different songs, human songs, songs that never really fit her mouth — and learning their ways. She knows how they weave their nets and sharpen their hooks, she knows how they clean and gut and devour their prey, and she knows how they hunt.

She might have become one of them herself, if she hadn’t been—

Well. Herself.

They circle the shoreline, their nets and their traps, like open jaws readying to snap shut. She remembers those moments too well: their teeth tearing pieces out of her head as they tore some hapless creature apart, the confusion and the pain, the endless echoing of screams that were not hers. She remembers how it hurt, how they hurt, how she hurt, how, after a while, it no longer mattered: theirs or hers, pain was pain and it went on and on and on and on.

There are no screams tonight, and there is no pain.

The nets drift empty, the traps lie open. The celebrations carry too well, the thrumming vibration of revelry sending its ripples across the sea and under it: a warning, to those savvy enough to hear it. Even down here she hears their songs still, as incomprehensible to her as hers must surely be to the creatures swimming out there, keeping their distance.

She wonders what they would see, those creatures, if they looked at her. One of their own, strangely shaped but still somehow familiar, or one of _them_ , the hunters and the fishers, the soulless wanderers who slaver for their meat and gnaw on their bones?

A threat. A monster. A— 

_Demon_.

She tears the nets apart with her bare hands, pulling at the cords until her fingers bleed. She crushes the traps between her hands, under her feet, whorls of salt sticking to few the shards and slivers that remain.

On dry land there will be hungry bellies.

Here in the water the songs will survive.

One world sacrificed for another, a choice with consequences. She knows this: she’s lived on both sides.

Sometimes she thinks she still does.

Both sides, sometimes neither side.

Tonight the choice is easy. The creatures swimming out there, singing their quiet, lonely songs; she is theirs, they are hers. She can’t join them, can’t speak to them or sing with them or share her spirit with them like she wants to, but she can protect them. They’ll never know it was her, but she will know.

Tomorrow’s choice will be just as easy. Tripitaka will get hungry, as humans so often do, and Sandy will find the nearest river and plunge in her fists and tear the life out of the first fish she finds. She will hear its cries, its screams, she will remember the first time, the last time, every other time it happened to them and to her, and she will shut her eyes and cover her ears and make its body into food.

Her stomach turns, twists, tangled like the cords of net still knotted around her knuckles. She tells herself it’s too much salt, too much seawater, too much swimming.

She tells herself—

She breaks to the surface, gasping. Choking on water, choking on air. She breaks to the surface, blinded by moonlight, chilled by the frozen air and lashed by the salt.

It is everywhere. It sticks to her skin, trapped in beads of water, turning it into something else. It settles inside of her, burning her lungs, sitting sourly in her stomach.

The bite of discomfort is a familiar thing, comforting in its way. It is home, the only language she speaks and hears and understands completely. It is who she is, a creature of the sea who lives on land.

She floats on her back, lets the black, brackish waves buoy her back to the shore. Limp, listless, lazy; she is the water and the water is her, and she trusts it to bring her back—

 _Home_.

The sea throws her back onto the shore and there it leaves her.

Wet sand, her namesake: the intermingling of water and earth.

 _Home_ , and she lies naked on her back and lets it pull her down.

*

“I thought I might find you here.”

Smiling, soft, sweet. Sandy doesn’t need to open her eyes to put a face to the voice, and so she doesn’t.

“Tripitaka,” she says, and—

It is a greeting, yes, and an invitation, and a prayer — adoration, devotion, worship: from the day they first met these things always fall so naturally off her tongue when she says Tripitaka’s name — but it is a sigh as well.

Tripitaka, seating herself beside her, hears it. “You okay?”

“Mm.” She doesn’t try for more. Not here. “The others?”

“Busy.” The word is a smile, warm and rich, coloured with secret meanings; Sandy understands little, but she understands this well enough. “They won’t disturb us.”

“I see.” She does, even before she opens her eyes and finds Tripitaka’s sparkling with warmth and a kind of hunger that has nothing to do with torn-up nets or crushed traps. “Are the revelries over?”

Tripitaka doesn’t answer. She’s staring at her, unabashed, lips parted and faintly smelling of liquor, and there is a hoarseness to her voice that Sandy recognises but only sort-of understands when she says, “You’ve been swimming.”

Sandy is not ashamed of her nakedness. She is ashamed of many things, but her body holds power and it has kept her alive, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in that.

She swallows a stuttering breath and says, “You’ve been drinking.”

Tripitaka’s laughter is warm. “Only a little. Politeness, you know?”

‘Politeness’: no, she does not know. Another reason why she’s glad she missed the celebration; she never knows what is polite until she’s done the opposite and suddenly the whole world is staring at her.

She looks up into Tripitaka’s eyes, dark with hunger and sparkling with starlight, and says, “I tore their nets apart.”

Tripitaka’s breath catches; she exhales shakily, warm air rolling like mist over Sandy’s collarbones. “Why?”

A simple question, one with many not-so-simple answers. She could give them, she knows, and Tripitaka would listen and hear and understand. But then she would ask questions, offer guidance, try to connect with her in that frightening, confusing way that she and the others so often do, and Sandy wouldn’t—

She doesn’t want to see her failings reflected under the stars.

She watches Tripitaka watching her, and says, “I don’t know.”

Tripitaka, who always seems to understand, even without words, nods and smiles and lets that be enough. She doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t offer guidance, doesn’t try to connect with things they both know she can’t.

She says, instead, with reverence, “You’re beautiful like this.”

Sandy tries to laugh, feels it catch in her throat, strangled and held down, a small wriggling thing trapped in a net. She feels like she’s drifting, like she’s floating, like she’s—

“Naked?” she asks, and her voice is a tremor she can’t pin down.

Tripitaka’s laughter is nothing like hers; it is warm and it is human and it is filled with so many things that Sandy wishes she could understand more easily than she does.

“Naked,” Tripitaka agrees, still so soft and so sweet. “And wrapped in water.”

Sandy looks down at herself, her long, lean body stretched out on the sand. The sea still clings to her, droplets of salt-beaded water rolling across her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach; it glitters, glimmers, gleams, liquid glass poured over porcelain, and she wishes their songs would stick as well inside her head, wishes Tripitaka could hear them as well as she can see her wet skin.

She wishes Tripitaka could—

She wishes she could understand.

She wishes they both could.

She looks down at her body, and then she looks up into Tripitaka’s sparkling, star-dusted eyes, and she—

She thinks of the sea, its black waves throwing her back onto the shore, and she thinks of its creatures, its swimming, singing things so far away and still so much a part of her. She thinks of their songs, thinks of the way she tries to sing back, and of the way they never, ever hear her.

She says, “The water doesn’t want me.”

Breathless, Tripitaka says, “I want you.”

Sandy’s throat tightens. Her fingers scrabble for purchase in the wet sand. She thinks—

She knows this.

They’ve made no secret of it, her beautiful, wonderful, deep-feeling friends. They tell her again and again and again that she is wanted, that she is loved, that whatever they are, whatever they’ve become, she is a part of it too.

A part but still apart.

This is by her choice, not by theirs.

This is because she—

Tripitaka is still staring, not at her body but at her mouth. Sandy’s lips sting; she wets them and she can still taste the sea, the lash of its salt splitting them open.

Splitting other parts of her open too, maybe.

She sits up, gazes out at the night-black sea, and lets her eyes unfocus. The horizon blurs, becomes one with the water, and she wishes she could do the same.

She sighs softly, and says to Tripitaka, “It must have been quite the celebration, for you to be so brazen.”

Tripitaka laughs, melodic and musical, a song so unlike the ones Sandy hears echoing inside her head.

“No,” she says.

Sandy catches the scent of liquor, imagines what it would taste like mingled with water and salt. “No?”

“No.” Her fingertips catch the moonlight, paler than usual under its ethereal glow; they’re trembling, yearning, and the part of Sandy that aches to understand these things yearns a little bit too. “Nothing like that. It’s just, you look so...”

Sandy knows how she looks: exposed and laid bare, her body spread open, rippling and wet and dusted with sand.

An invitation, yes, for one who desires such things.

She thinks that must be how she looks. She thinks—

She says, “Naked?”

Tripitaka shakes her head.

“Lonely,” she says.

And those trembling, yearning fingertips find the tight lines of her jaw, and Sandy is suspended and paralysed, held as much in thrall now to the delicate press of Tripitaka’s touch as she was ever was to the pulling waves of the sea.

Her breath stills, becomes stagnant in her chest. “Um...”

“Do you know,” Tripitaka whispers, “how much we love you?”

Sandy’s vision blurs with a different, sharper sort of salt.

“Of course,” she says.

It’s true — she knows it, she does, they tell her all the time — but it’s also not. It’s another language, love, from this world that isn’t really hers, that never was and never will be, and its myriad meanings snare and snarl inside her head; she understands some parts, but others are elusive and chaotic and she can’t make it connect to the things she’s watched them do to each other, the things she knows they want to do to her as well.

She tries sometimes.

Fleeting kisses, mostly with Tripitaka, whom she trusts and loves above all else, even the others. Brushes of contact that mean more after they’re finished than they did before they started, that perhaps mean more than she'll ever fully know. Her fingers tangled with Monkey’s, her back pressed against Pigsy’s, protection of a kind she never imagined would be hers.

Love, intimacy, is keeping each other alive.

Their moments, their kisses, their touches—

She loves the press of Monkey’s palm when they hold hands, loves the way his callouses find hers. Her hands are seldom bare, usually covered by her sleeves and the haft of her scythe, and she rarely gets to indulge the sweet serration of someone else’s scars settling into the space between her own. She so rarely gets the chance to remember that hers are not alone.

She loves the taste of Tripitaka’s mouth. Warm, wet, wanting; if there was a home for her between the earth and the sea, she thinks it might be there.

She loves—

It’s not the same, the kind of love she feels in moments like that. It’s different from the love they share with each other, the love they want for her too.

Another language that she does not understand.

She wants to, she thinks sometimes. She wants—

She turns her face to the side, presses her lips to the pad of Tripitaka’s thumb.

 _I want_ , she thinks, but she doesn’t know how to turn that thought into words.

Tripitaka watches her, breathless, heavy-lidded, yearning.

“I want you,” she says again, and Sandy thinks _this, this is how it should sound_ , and she knows that she will never be able to make it sound that way herself.

“I want,” she says, and the syllables shudder like waves that don’t want to break, like fishing nets torn apart by her bloodied fingers. “I want to understand.”

And inside her head, the swimming, singing things whisper, _I want to belong_.

*

They lie together on the sand, side-by-side, naked.

Tripitaka holds her close, their bodies pressed together at shoulder and breast, hip and thigh. The contact is overwhelming and a bit terrifying, and Sandy knows that Tripitaka must feel her trembling.

Indeed, the smile on her face carries a different kind of understanding. She holds her close, kisses her slow, and says like it’s a secret not meant for sharing, “I know you’ve never done this before.”

Sandy thinks that’s true. She—

She doesn’t know for certain.

There is a line, she’s sure, between this and _this_ , between intimacy and _being intimate_ , between the kind of naked contact that is normal between friends who love each other and the kind that holds deeper meaning and has a language all its own.

There are things she has done. There are things she hasn’t. And she doesn’t know—

She knows the line exists, but she doesn’t know where it is drawn. She doesn’t know where those deeper meanings find their footholds, where touches evolve into a purer kind of communication, where kisses become ciphers and fingerprints become stories and then songs.

She doesn’t—

This language, she does not know at all. She doesn’t speak it, and she doesn’t understand it when it is spoken to her.

When _they_ —

Monkey tried to teach her once, the language of tactile pleasure. A gift in return for the scanty few words she taught him in the ancient language of the gods, aborted before they got even half as far as this. His touches were sure and strong, slipping so easily through the shadows between scar and sinew, singing and scribbling and scrawling out secret lessons: words, different from the ones she taught him but just as incomprehensible.

Tripitaka tried as well, on one of the cold winter nights when they shared a bedroll. Her hand on Sandy’s hip, fingers splayed and stretching lower, her mouth slack and half-open, pressed hungrily to the slim curve of a breast; eyes shut, breathing shallow, Sandy feigned a sleep that did not find her until dawn.

Did those moments count, she wonders now, breathless and nervous and a little frightened. Sometimes she thinks she feels Monkey’s callouses when the weather darkens and her scars ache and the sinew tugs and draws taut; sometimes she thinks she has Tripitaka’s fingerprints inscribed under her skin, hidden but indelible, the press of her palm against her pelvis, her breasts heavier with phantom kisses.

She thinks that is intimacy. She thinks it means—

But Tripitaka holds her now like this — no, _this_ , with emphasis, with passion — is something wholly and entirely new, like all those moments were nothing.

Sandy wants to ask her about it. She wants to know, wants to learn, wants to understand, but Tripitaka’s tongue is in her mouth and she can’t think clearly.

She thinks—

She breaks free, turns her head to the side, breathes heavily against Tripitaka’s neck. Inhale, exhale, and she thinks she’s gasping, she thinks she’s panting, she thinks—

Tripitaka kisses her temple, warm and wet, and whispers, “Yes.”

It is one word, and so many words, and Sandy is overwhelmed.

It is not passion that makes her duck her head; it is not desire that makes her bury her face in Tripitaka’s neck and gasp and pant and whimper. It is not lust or want or hunger; it’s not even the bite of not-unpleasant pain as Tripitaka’s fingers tangle in her hair and tug. It is the need to hide, the overstimulation just from this, from being held and touched and kissed and wanted, _wanted_ —

Tripitaka moans. The hand knotted in her hair tightens its grip; the other, pressed to the base of Sandy’s spine, pushes and squeezes and clenches bruise-hard.

Sandy whimpers again, pressing confused, desperate kisses to Tripitaka’s jaw, to her throat, and Tripitaka’s body seizes and shivers, pressing closer, holding tighter.

“Yes,” she says again. “Yes, good, Sandy, _yes_.”

Each word is a dozen new words, and Sandy tries to hold on to them, tries to find their meanings, but her head is spinning and her senses are full and she feels too much.

Underneath their bodies, underneath the sand, the scared, shell-less creatures scramble and skitter away. Overwhelmed and oversensitive, Sandy hears and feels it all: their fear, their panic, their desperation so different from her own. Just like her they want to be safe, they want to hide, they want—

Their fear-song shrieks like a siren inside her head. She wants to tell them that she’s like them, that they’re like her, that they have no reason to be afraid. She wants to tell them that there is no danger here, that this is an act of creation not destruction, she wants to tell them—

She wants—

“Sandy.”

— _Tripitaka_ , her body trembling against her own, taut and tight like a string about to snap, her gasps and moans shaping a different sort of song, a song Sandy has never heard before, a symphony of sensations that chases all the other ones away.

She doesn’t know it and she does not understand it, but she would do anything to keep hearing it.

She lifts her head, tastes the starlight sprinkling Tripitaka’s lips, and says, “Show me what to do.”

*

Tripitaka’s skin tastes like the sea.

Wanting and wanton, wet and warm.

Sweat stinging with salt, sand sticking to the surface, sparkling and shimmering and starlit: she is radiant even in the darkness, she is ferocity even on her back. She is breathtaking and beautiful, and Sandy is overwhelmed and overwrought and utterly, utterly helpless. She doesn’t know what she’s doing but she thinks she doesn’t ever want to stop.

Tripitaka teaches her not with her voice but with her body. With her hands, yanking on her hair, squeezing her neck and her shoulders, clenching her fists in the sand and then bringing them up to cover her back, shell-strewn shards covering them both. With her mouth, hauling her back up to kiss her hard and then shoving her back down to a symphony of hoarse, jagged, beautiful whines.

Her hips hitch and stutter. Her back lifts in a perfect arc. Her belly, taut as a drum, twitches and tenses under Sandy’s tongue, under her hands, under her—

Under _her_.

Is it a language, she wonders, delirious and dizzy, if it doesn’t have any words?

She doesn’t know.

She only knows that she tastes the sea in the hard lines of Tripitaka’s body, tastes the sand in its softer curves, tastes the hazy remnants of the others, her friends, in the spaces where she knows they’ve been.

She tastes salt and sweat and sand, she tastes want and need and desire, she tastes _Tripitaka_ , and her tongue holds those things on its tip as if they were songs.

She finds the shadows between Tripitaka’s thighs, hot and wet and hungry, and Tripitaka throws a leg over her shoulder and drives her heel into her back and chokes on her name again and again and again.

 _Yes_ , she doesn’t say, and _more_ and _please_ and _oh oh oh—_

Sandy hears all those things, and she doesn’t know how.

She finds a path and follows it, guided by the pressure of Tripitaka’s heel, the tension in her thighs, the rising pitch of her moans. Guided by instinct a little bit too, the part of her that knows what those things mean even without any experience, even without having ever done anything like this before. Tripitaka’s choked-out cries are like music, the backbeat to a song she’s never heard but still somehow recognises its rhythm.

Like the creatures in the sea, calling not to her but to each other, their loneliness catching the beat of her heart even though they’ve never heard it.

She’s never heard Tripitaka’s heartbeat before, not like this, so close and so intimate, but still somehow she knows what it means when her pulse quickens, still somehow she knows to quicken her own pace in turn, to plunge deeper, to dive, to—

 _Swim_.

To hold herself afloat, sort of, kept in place by the locking of Tripitaka’s thighs, suspended by the distant keening of her voice, words she doesn’t understand, words that might not even really be words at all. Her name, again and again and again, worshipful and wondrous, and Sandy has never thought that hated word might hold so much meaning, that it might somehow be a language all its own, but still when Tripitaka gasps and groans and calls her name she knows which syllable means _yes_ and which means _oh_.

Her body responds too. Heat coiling in her belly, tiny spasms of not-pain when Tripitaka stumbles over her nonsense words, her own thighs clenching too, involuntarily, when Tripitaka’s tighten around her head, when she grips her hair and pulls harder, when she arches her back and jerks her hips, when the warm wetness surges under her tongue, overpowering and overwhelming.

Her body responds, yes, in harmony with Tripitaka’s, new sensations awakening inside of her like seeds bursting to life under the earth. It rises, it plunges, it rises, it scorches and sears; it is everywhere, everything, _everywhere_ , and she can no longer tell which one of them is swallowing the other, which one of them is swimming and which is drowning.

She thinks she wouldn’t mind drowning in this.

She thought, once, she wouldn’t mind drowning in the sea either.

She still thinks that sometimes. She still feels—

But not here. Not like this. Here, like this, she feels only what Tripitaka feels: seizing muscles and pitchy cries, the pleasure rippling through her body like currents pulsing and swirling beneath the surface of the sea, buoyed and buoying, rising and falling and rising again like— 

“ _Ah_!”

—a breaking wave, roaring, pounding, throwing itself over the sand and stone, over the dry earth, and Sandy is suspended, again, between the wet heat, the rush of passion and pleasure, its sweet-salty flavour flooding her tongue like seawater, and the earthen, solid body driving its power, the fingers yanking in her hair, the heel digging into her back, sand and flesh and bone and—

And she doesn’t know any more, where the sea ends and the earth begins, only that her mouth is filled with wetness and salt and her body is pressed hard to the ground.

The spasms roll through them both. Tripitaka’s body is like an earthquake, shuddering and shaking and shouting, shouting, _shouting_ , and Sandy is like a small stone hurled into the sea, floating and sinking and floating once more, small and scared and swept away, pulled down and thrown up and up and—

“Up.”

Tripitaka, breathless, panting, tugging on her hair until she lifts her head, until she blinks up into glazed, starry eyes, lidded with pleasure, gleaming and glowing and—

She rises.

 _Up_ , just as she was told, washing up over Tripitaka’s body like a different kind of wave, like a cleansing river bubbling over sharp-edged rocks, dizzied and dazed and—

And Tripitaka yanks her up and kisses her, hot and hard and hungry, and—

And the inside of her mouth is somehow wetter, Sandy thinks, than the slick heat lingering on her tongue.

She hears herself moan, feels herself tremble, and she melts against her not like salt but like sugar, too sweet and too overwhelmed.

Tripitaka, trembling just as hard, holds her close and strokes her back and whispers, over and over, “ _Yes_.”

Sandy swallows the word, lets it slide down her throat with the salt-sweet aftertaste of Tripitaka’s climax. “Are you...?”

“Oh, yes.”

And she kisses her again, slower and softer and sort of endlessly, until Sandy thinks that’s the only word she’ll ever need to know.

*

Her own pleasure is not such a simple thing.

It is confusion, clumsiness, her lack of comprehension laid bare. It is madness, a clashing of languages not quite like water or like earth, like a brutal blending of them both, the sea throwing itself in vain against a vast wall of stone. A language that claws inside her head like screams, a language that spills out of her like fragments of someone else’s poetry, a language that makes no sense to her even as she hears herself speaking it.

She doesn’t understand it.

It holds her body tight and does not let go. It roils in her belly, coils like a snake readying to strike. It is wet heat between her thighs and dry earth between her ribs, it is the sea and it is the sand and it is—

It is _her_ , but she doesn’t understand it at all.

Tripitaka touches her like she’s on fire, like maybe they both are. Hungry and heavy-lidded, she looks at her like this was what she meant when she said _I want you_ , not to be taken but to take.

Her mouth is pressed to the curve of Sandy’s breast, teeth and tongue and tenderness, and she whispers, like it’s a secret not for the body but for the spirit, “Good,” and “Yes,” and “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It is a marvel, Sandy thinks as she shudders and shakes, how easily she can say those words when she’s not the one on her back, when she’s not the one being touched and teased and taken and—

Her own voice is an unfamiliar thing, raggedness and confusion and strange sensations all clogging her throat and thickening her tongue, and she doesn’t know what she wants but she can hear herself choking on _pleasepleaseplease_.

It is so much.

It is too—

Too much, yes, _too much_ , and even before Tripitaka’s wandering hands find their way south Sandy’s body is already looking for ways to clamp down, to seize up and freeze up and protect itself. Her thighs are pressed together, muscles clenching, and she doesn’t know whether she’s resisting or welcoming, whether she wants to push Tripitaka away from her or pull her down into the too-tight space and roll her hips _up_.

“Please,” she gasps, and only realises she’s said it aloud when Tripitaka lifts her head to gaze up at her.

Bathed in the burning moonlight, lips sprinkled with salt and eyes shimmering with stars, she is the most beautiful thing Sandy has ever seen. Blinding, breathtaking, beatific, so much that Sandy almost forgets the clamouring sensations pulling her body to pieces, almost forgets how completely those eyes have devoured her, how thoroughly those lips have consumed her.

She is wet. Not like the ocean, roaring and rising and filled with life, but like the sand, fine grains made sticky by the waves that crash and crash and crash.

She is wet, marked in the places where Tripitaka’s mouth has left its brand: the damp undersides of her breasts trailed and trawled by her tongue, the hardened peaks of her nipples laved and loved and almost sore, her shoulders and her collarbones and her ribs, well-kissed and well-mapped, heat and want poured like paint over her skin.

She is wet, the aftertaste of hot liquor on her tongue where Tripitaka kissed her, sweat breaking out all over her body, mingling with the salt and the sand.

She is—

“ _Wet_ ,” Tripitaka whispers, fingers tangling in the damp hair between her thighs, the place where she’s clenching, where she’s squeezing, where she’s already overwhelmed.

“Yes,” she hears herself gasp, and it is nothing at all like the way Tripitaka said it, but it’s all she has, the word and the truth of it, the flood rising under Tripitaka’s fingertips.

Tripitaka kisses the base of her throat, the curve of her jaw, the corner of her mouth. She kisses her like she’s precious, like she’s perfect, like she really believes Sandy is beautiful like this, sprawled on her back in the sand, covered in shards of the sea and scraps of the earth.

Like maybe she can see the ghosts of those swimming singing things in her eyes as clearly as Sandy can see the starlight in hers.

She kisses her slow and deep, open-mouthed and ravenous, and her fingers slip lower, easing Sandy’s thighs apart, finding the place where she’s hottest, where she’s wettest, where she’s—

Sandy cries out, a strangled sort of sob lost to the back of Tripitaka’s mouth.

Tripitaka’s hand freezes, fingers poised but held still; she pulls back and kisses Sandy’s cheek, her temple, humming and murmuring, soothing her with sound, with—

 _Song_.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, and “I love you,” and Sandy knows that it’s true — she does, she does — but it doesn’t sound like any of the songs she thought she knew.

A new language, a different one, and she doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know what any of it means, but her body responds as if it’s been speaking it for all her life.

“Please,” she hears herself moan, and spreads herself wider without thinking. “Please, please, I want—”

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what she wants, or how she wants it, she doesn’t know anything.

Tripitaka kisses her again, harder, swallowing down her pleas, her prayers, her confusion. A hum, musical and melodic against the roof of her mouth, a pulsing vibrato covering her tongue, and then her hand is moving, her fingers sliding effortlessly through the wetness, over and across the too-sensitive skin, over and across and—

 _In_ , and she bites down, catches Sandy’s lip between her teeth and swallows the next cry, and the next.

It is, for a moment, entirely too much. The strange new song of her body — no, _their_ bodies, singing in harmony even though she doesn’t know the chords — coupling with the softer songs of the sea, and then the song of celebration from the village behind them, coupling and coupling around her and within her.

It is so much. It is too much. It is—

“Does it hurt?” Tripitaka asks her.

“Yes,” Sandy says, but she doesn’t mean the new ache inside of her, the stretch and the sting and the slide of Tripitaka’s fingers as they press in and in and in, the overstimulated sensation of _this_ and _them_ and pain-pleasure-pain- _pleasure_ -pain, the strangeness and the soreness of being spread open and taken and wanted and loved, loved, loved.

She doesn’t mean any of that.

She means—

She means the confusion, the chaos, the clashing of so many impossible sensations all at once. She means the parts of herself that are overwhelmed and overwrought, that want to clench and flinch and pull away, and she means the parts of herself that want more, need more, that want to arch her back and roll her hips and grab Tripitaka’s wrist and drive her in deeper, further, harder.

She means both of those things at the same time, the need for more and the need for less and the need, the _need_ —

Tripitaka cups the back of her neck with her free hand, dry and clean and earthen. Grounding, tethering, anchoring.

“Do you want me to stop?” she asks. “I can stop, we can stop, I can...”

Sandy nods, then, shakes her head, both as desperate as each other.

She does want that, but she also doesn’t. She wants less, she wants more, she wants everything and nothing all at once, and she cannot begin to put all those different wants and needs into words, into something like connection, communication, something like a language.

“No” she manages at last, rolling her hips like water, pressing her body up against Tripitaka’s, sticky and salty and sandswept. “Show me, please, I want to know, I want to—”

 _Understand_.

And she does. The heat and the burn, the pain-pleasure, the vivid physicality of it. The raw, ragged, razed feeling that cuts through her, the ignition under her skin, inside her bones and her blood. The places where their bodies touch, fused together with sand and salt and sweat, the places where she is hot and the places where she’s pricked with chills, shivering, shuddering, shaking—

She wants to understand it all.

She wants to feel it and know it and understand it. She wants it so, so much.

 _Please_ , she thinks, and Tripitaka kisses her slow and moves her hand slower.

It is poetry, the way she kisses her, the way she touches her, the way she moves and moves and _moves_. It is a song without music or words or cadence, and Sandy’s body understands so much more than her mind ever will.

Her hips lift. Her thighs clamp down, trapping Tripitaka’s wrist, trapping her hand; she is moving too, just as jaggedly as Tripitaka, arching and writhing in rhythm with her strokes, her touches, her kisses, her soundless words.

_I’ve got you, it’s okay, you’re beautiful, you’re perfect, I love you, I want you, I love you I love you I love you._

Sandy has loved Tripitaka since before they ever met. But there is a difference between the kind of love that grows from loneliness, the kind of devotion that comes from darkness and despair, and _this_ , a kind that is sort-of-new but sort-of-not, alive here in the space between the earth and the sea, between one kind of not-understanding and another.

She is salt, churned up by the water, drifting and dancing, suspended and then cast about, helpless. She is sand, gritted and ground up, untouchable in the high, dry places, transformed when she is wet. She slips through Tripitaka’s fingers, then Tripitaka’s fingers knead and press and _move_ and she becomes something new, held together and sticky and close to whole.

Close to—

The sea and its swimming, singing things, its cycles of creation and destruction, loneliness and love and a yearning to belong. The sea, and she hears it again inside her head, resonating with the hum of Tripitaka’s voice, its salty, sandy flavour mingling with the need on her tongue, the beach-flayed press of her lips, the haven and the harbour of her body, small and strong and human.

Somewhere out there in the depths, a small creature is devoured by a big one. Sandy feels it and hears it all — the little one’s pain and the bigger one’s pleasure — and she thinks, delirious and desperate and arching her back, _that’s me_.

She is both of them at once, devourer and devoured, ravenous and ravaged, swallowed up by something so much bigger than herself and still aching, yearning, hungering for more. She feels it all, out there under the waves and inside herself as well, and she shudders, overwhelmed and disoriented, feeling too much and understanding too little, and her body tenses and tightens and—

And Tripitaka’s teeth graze the hollow at the base of her throat, the place where she holds all those songs that no-one else hears, and the sound that tears out of her is not a song at all, but something entirely new.

She cries out, shivering and shuddering, shaking and shaking and—

And _sobbing_ , a high guttural wail that silences even the songs of the sea, the ones out there in the deep and the ones hidden inside her heart, loneliness and longing and—

And Tripitaka’s fingers are suddenly still, frozen inside of her like a tidal wave turned to solid ice, pressed hard against her as she spasms and sobs and keens and cries and—

And then it’s done, all that sensation ebbing out of her like the tide retreating back to the sea, back and back until there’s nothing left but boneless, breathless trembling.

Tripitaka kisses the crook of her neck, the curve of her jaw, moaning and panting her name like Sandy’s pleasure was hers as well.

Lower, much lower, there’s a slick shudder of sort-of pain as she pulls her hand free, wet fingers daubing poetry and patterns over Sandy’s thighs, over the jutting bones of her hips, over the taut plane of her belly.

“Good?” she asks.

Sandy doesn’t know if that’s the word she’d use. She’s not sure what word she would use, in truth, and so she lets her head drop back to strike the wet sand and blurts out the first one that comes into her head:

“Overwhelming.”

Right or wrong, it makes Tripitaka laugh. “It can be that way, yeah.”

Sandy closes her eyes, imagines herself drowning. “Even for you?”

“If it’s done right.”

It is harder than it should be, to keep from asking, _did I do it right?_

She says, instead, “Thank you.”

Tripitaka curls up beside her in the sand, sweat-damp skin growing cool against her own. “You’re welcome.”

It is a different kind of intimacy, lying together like that. The quiet after the storm, the silence after the shouts and sobs, the calm that comes after feeling too much.

Sandy is not particularly well acquainted with calm, but she thinks she might feel it here, if only a little bit.

Tripitaka lies in her arms, head resting lazily on her collarbone, peppering kisses over and under her breasts. _Calm_ , and Sandy drinks in the sensation, the slowing of her heartbeat — their heartbeats, the two of them in perfect rhythm — and she wonders if this new language will stay with her, if she will remember these songs.

She wonders if it will matter if she doesn’t.

She sighs and says, “I understand so little.”

Tripitaka tilts her head, looking up at her through sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes. She is flushed and sated, bathed in moonlight and starlight, dressed in salt and sand and nothing else, and Sandy thinks she’s never seen anything more beautiful in either of the worlds she knows, not above the water’s surface or in its depths.

“That’s the thing about this,” Tripitaka says. Her voice is thick with satisfaction, the words muffled and sucked up by Sandy’s skin. “You don’t need to understand it.”

Perhaps not. But—

“I think I’d like to.”

Tripitaka’s smile is an impossible, unfathomable thing; it holds all the world inside it, the earth and the sea and all the places in between, neither wet nor dry, floating nor grounded. It is radiant and dazzling, and Sandy feels so small and so exposed to be held in its glow, illuminated even out here in the stillness of the night.

“Okay.” She finds Sandy’s hand, squeezes it gently. “We can do that.”

Sandy swallows, overwhelmed all over again. “I want to, I want, I...”

 _I want you_ , she still can’t say.

Next time, perhaps, or the time after that. When she’s learned more of this new language, when she’s learned its shape and its nuances and how to make it fit on her tongue.

When she’s learned—

If she’s able to learn.

Tripitaka shifts a little beside her, crawling high enough to kiss her. “We love you,” she says, and Sandy hears, _even if you don’t understand this, even if you don’t understand us, even if you don’t understand anything at all_.

It is meant as a comfort, she thinks.

She squeezes Tripitaka’s shoulder, strokes her back, caresses her hip. She basks for a moment in the warmth of such contact, and says, “I think I’ll stay out here for a while.”

Alone, she means, with the water.

Tripitaka understands. She kisses her once more, not on the mouth but on the forehead, then stands.

“You really are beautiful like this,” she says, in the trembling whisper of one awed by the truth of it.

Sandy feels suddenly exposed and flayed. She wants to cover herself, she wants to hide, she wants—

“Please,” she says, and it’s a completely different word to the last six, seven, eight times she said it.

Again, Tripitaka understands. Her eyes grow soft, her smile grows sad, and she turns away like a half-starved urchin turning her back on a feast. _Love_ , Sandy thinks, and the word catches like a thorn inside her head, like an anchor tugging her heart down and down until it settles, a little too heavy, in her stomach.

She thinks—

No.

She sits up, watching the arc of Tripitaka’s spine, the sway of her hips, the salt and sand and stardust sparkling on her skin. She watches her walk away, watches her bend to retrieve her clothes, watches the lines of her body like they hold the secrets to her own. 

She watches her, every line, every curve, every detail, and she doesn’t let herself think at all.

*

Alone again, she dives back into the sea and swims.

Sticky, sweaty, gritted with salt and painted with sand, with Tripitaka’s fingerprints scorched onto her skin, she tells herself she needs to bathe.

She does; it’s true. But that’s not why she goes back.

They’re still out there, those swimming, singing things, and with them the pieces of herself that not even Tripitaka will ever be able to touch.

Weighed down by the salt of the earth, she is lashed now by the salt of the sea. The waves are rougher than they were, made wild by the pull of the moon, and she is pulled along with them, suspended and then submerged, thrown up and dragged down and hurled about like salvage, like the discarded bones of creatures no-one will mourn.

She is not like them, she knows: she would be mourned, she would be missed. She is wanted, she is loved.

She knew this, even before tonight buried it deep inside her.

But still, theirs are the songs she hears as she drifts: the whispers of the lost, the forgotten, and the lonely.

This time she doesn’t try to add her song to theirs.

This time she allows herself to just drift and listen.

She is transformed, sensitised and sensitive. Her body is alight, ignited in places she hadn’t known were there, a living flame that burns even underwater. The sea finds every crack in her skin, every nerve, every vein, every part of her; it cuts her open and pours itself inside, and even if she wanted to resist she wouldn’t know where to begin.

She doesn’t want to.

The sea is her home, just as Tripitaka is her home: it may not hear her, may not understand her, may not even know her, but it devours her even so. It wrecks her just as thoroughly as Tripitaka’s pressing fingers or choked-out moans, it ruins her just as completely as a kiss or a touch or a—

Or a whisper, breathless and shaking with pleasure and want, _“I love you.”_

She thinks perhaps she’s been seeking the wrong kind of understanding.

Tripitaka knows her, sees her, feels her, loves her. Her tongue finds her sensitive spots, her hands find the places where she burns and burns, and all this without speaking a word.

The sea does much the same. Its creatures whisper their songs in her head, in her blood, resonating and echoing inside her, as intimate as Tripitaka’s kisses, as deep as her touch.

Sandy thinks—

No. She _knows_ this should be enough.

It should be—

That she is able to hear their voices at all, that she is able to share their songs, to feel what they feel, to suffer their fear and pain, to be dazzled by their moments of joy. That she can feel the tug of loneliness in her chest and not know for certain if it’s hers of theirs or both. To know that these creatures feel as she does, that they see the world through the same water-blurred screen, that they think in the same colours.

Their songs have a home inside her head.

It should be enough.

She shouldn’t feel the ache, the the lonely yearning to find a home in theirs too.

She has a home in the earth.

She has a home in Tripitaka’s arms, in Tripitaka’s mouth, under Tripitaka’s hands.

It should be—

The water holds her. Its swimming, singing creatures don’t chase her away and they don’t flee from her. They may not understand her but they don’t hate her either.

It’s more than she can say for the ones that live on land.

She is amphibious, a creature of both and of neither. She can’t expect either place to hold her as one of their own when she isn’t, when she never was and never will be.

She breathes in both. She thrives in neither. She wants—

She thinks in bubbles and ripples and waves; that sets her apart from the earth and the rocks, from her friends with their feet on the ground. She speaks with her lungs full of air and her heart full of stone, and she knows these swimming, submerged creatures will never understand the sounds that spill, airy and earthen, from her mouth.

Her friends love her. She loves them too, she thinks, but it is so different to the love she feels out here in the open sea. Love from the body, burning and stone-strewn and grounded, and love from the spirit, bubbling and rippling and hurling its watery waves over her again and again and again. Love, love, love, and it should be—

It is.

It _is_.

She dives.

Down, down, until she finds the sea-bed, all sticky sand and wave-tossed shells, pebbles rubbed smooth and rolling, creatures who wander the surface and don’t hide beneath in fear of humans. No reason to be afraid down here, and no pain; she and Tripitaka could do anything to each other down here, if only humans breathed water, and these creatures would not care at all.

It is both worlds, like the beach is both worlds, the earth covered by water, the water laving the land. She thinks maybe she could thrive down here, if she had a mind to, with these happy skittering things, and never miss the sun.

Oh, but she would miss her friends.

She can’t stay here, in this place where she will never be heard or seen or understood. She can only visit, can only relish the few blessed moments where she understands other voices with absolute clarity, relish the ebb and flow of cool water across her skin, the tug and pull of currents over and under and around her. It is her, but it is not hers; she is a stranger here, no less than she is out there, but here she has no friends to keep her afloat.

She is still learning, day by day, what a wonderful gift it is to have that.

Tripitaka’s smile, her tongue in her mouth. Monkey’s hands, his familiar callouses covering her own. Pigsy, back to back, protecting and guarding and making sure she stays fed.

These things are home, they are belonging. Sandy may not ever understand them, may never be able to grasp the nuances of what they say and what they feel, but they are hers.

That place is hers.

But this place...

This place is her.

Inside her, blood and bone and breath. Around her, the ebb and flow of water making her skin feel alive, comfortable and restful in a way she never is on dry land. This place beats in her heart, thrums in her nerves, sings in every atom in her body. It is _her_ , within and without, but it is not and will never be _hers_.

Not like they are.

Her friends, who love her. Her friends, who understand her even when she doesn’t understand them.

Her friends, and the skittering creatures beneath the sand, the ones like her, who hide without homes.

She thinks of them fleeing for their lives as she and Tripitaka coupled on the surface, unable to tell the difference between an act of destruction and an act of creation. She thinks of them, vulnerable and frightened and confused, she thinks of herself — so much the same, even as she is held and loved and wanted — and she smiles.

Here at the bottom of the sea, sheltered and salted and surrounded by songs she can only sing in spirit, she scours the ocean floor and gathers shells.

She can’t speak to those creatures, the ones who should be here but are stuck there instead, thrown up by the tides and left to fend for themselves just as she was all those years ago. She can’t tell them they’re the same, can’t make them understand a language that is not theirs, but she can love them and take care of them, and she can give them a home just as her friends have done for her.

She so seldom understands them, her friends. But they don’t care; they love her anyway.

It is the least she could do, she thinks, to pass such warmth and love onto others like her.

*

Back on the shore, back on dry land, she scatters the shells over the sand.

A few here, a few here, but never too many in one place. There are so many creatures under its surface, hidden and unseen by those who crush their homes and walk the ground on top of them; there are so many lonely little things, homeless and helpless and vulnerable, and she knows that fear and pain so, so well, she knows how it feels to have nothing but sand to cover her soft places.

They sing to each other, and to their brethren in the depths; they sing to her too, though they don’t know it, and though she cannot return their song in any way they will hear or know or understand, she can do this.

Scattered shells, unbroken and safe: little sanctuaries plucked from the water and deposited on dry land. Perhaps they will find a home in them, perhaps they won’t; perhaps with the coming of the morning, these shells too will be crushed under the boots of humans, like all the others before. She doesn’t know, can’t know. But still she tries, and even if they don’t know that it was her they will know that someone did, that someone cared.

They will know, she hopes, that someone saw them, hiding down there in the dark with nothing, and understood them. That someone, understanding their fear and their pain and their loneliness, loved them enough to give them a home.

It is all she can do, but she hopes it will be enough.

She sits on the sand when she’s finished, some safe distance from the shells and the creatures who might seek shelter in them. Alone and silent, speckled with salt and starlight, she sits on the sand and gazes out at the singing sea.

It is beautiful, breathtaking. It is like Tripitaka, radiant in her nakedness, shameless in her pleasure, delicious and devastating and filling her, filling her completely. It is a part of her but apart from her, and just like Tripitaka it touches her in places no-one else ever has or will. It is where her spirit lives, just as Tripitaka is where her body lives, and she knows that she could not survive in either place without the love of the other.

Under her hands, under her body, the sand shifts.

Restless, she thinks, like her.

Like her, flowing and fluid when it’s dry, solid and sticking when wet. Like her, living under the water and on the earth, churned up and fractured by water and air alike, shards and pieces stolen from the sea and thrown up onto the shore, small and easily shattered but still strong, still powerful enough to hold itself together. So fragile and so delicate, but hiding a world of sea and song beneath its surface.

Like her, broken up but still whole.

It is her name, and it is who she is.

She gazes out at the sea, and she sits on the sand, and she thinks of the world below, sharing its songs and its feelings, its fears and its pain and its loneliness, sharing the parts of itself that churn and flow and swim within her too. She thinks of its creatures, singing their songs to others who don’t understand them, and she thinks of herself, trying so hard to comprehend the language of the body, the language of the earth.

She hopes those creatures have friends who will help them, friends who will be patient with them.

She hopes they will know that somewhere, far away from their ocean home, someone loves them.

Their songs will never fit on her land-bound tongue. But they live inside her all the same, and that—

That, she thinks, is enough.

She stands.

She stands and she smiles, and she gazes out to the sea and sings a last lingering lonely note to all the creatures who cannot hear her.

Then she turns around and returns her body to the earth, and her spirit to the friends who love her.

**


End file.
